


The Man in the Seine

by binz, shiplizard



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Hornblower (TV), Hornblower - C. S. Forester, Time War - Fandom
Genre: Age of Sail, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, Characters Played By The Same Actor, Fusion, Gen, Original Characters Who Nope Out, warriors - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 11:57:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/binz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/shiplizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Make me a warrior,’ he said. ‘Watch me,’ said the TARDIS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man in the Seine

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a ‘Night of the Doctor’ AU and a prequel for [a Big Finish audio](http://sidhebeingbrand.tumblr.com/post/76710893142/sidhebeingbrand-coming-soon-from-what-if) that doesn’t exist. We just wish it did. Link contains mild spoilers for the fic; fic contains mild spoilers for _Night of the Doctor_ and the book _Lord Hornblower_ by C S Forester.
> 
> Contains ablism, particularly regarding mental health. Some gore. Mentions of a post-disaster township.

It’s barely dawn when Manette leaves her sister’s farm and makes her way along the Seine, upriver towards Caudebec. She’s wearing her three layers of socks as well as another pair borrowed from Odile, her thickest petticoats and shawls, and her hands are tucked inside gloves and clutched against her chest, but her skin still stings with the cold. Her father had wanted to come with her this morning, but Odile and her husband had kept him busy in the farmhouse so she could slip out without him noticing, fussing with the baby and making talk about how the harsh cold this year might delay the spring thaw.

Whether they will be allowed to keep any crops is another question-- and whether the they in question will come to include her and her father, if their home in Caudebec is so destroyed, is another. She is so tired of war.

There is still a tang of smoke in the air, not nearly as choking as three nights ago, when the explosions lit up the sky and filled the air with gunpowder and stink, but when mixed with the cold, it’s enough to catch in her lungs and make her cough when she breathes too deeply. In the distance, she thinks she can already see Caudebec, but it’s only a black smear on the grey sky; she is close enough to see the wooden debris washed ashore and clogging the river, but not what remains of the little town. 

There’s ice and slush along the water’s edge, crusted on the rocks that line the shore; it’s broken by the battle debris-- the jagged pieces of wood that mostly seem to be the remains of boats, some cannon balls, everything iced over where it is exposed to the surface. Soon the body parts appear: the first, a bloody forearm severed at the elbow, lodged between a broken oar and the shore, then a leg, the flesh white and blue, frosted over. 

It gets worse as she gets closer to the town; bloody rags, limbs, a torso, a head. She can see more as the sun rises, ghastly and terrible. There’s a body of a chicken, soggy, feathers half crusted with ice. She wonders if it is one of hers; if there will be anything left to salvage, if there is anything but memories left to call Caudebec. She clenches her jaw and stomps along the bank, trying to ignore the broken soldiers and sailors below. Her heart feels as numb as her feet, as hard as the frozen ground; she has learned to look at the clothes of the fallen to see how likely they are to carry valuable things.

The bank slopes downward, closer and closer to the icy, clogged river, until she must walk carefully so she doesn’t slip in the frozen mud, only a few feet from the carnage of shattered wood and occasional men. She starts when she sees the next body, only a few feet away down the sloping bank. 

He looks almost peaceful, his face reposed and still on the gravel and ice half up on the shore. He was clinging to a large river stone when he died. She can’t tell who he was, his clothing is dark and water-logged, frozen in stiff folds. It may have been black, it may have been blue; he was not a British redcoat, but that is all she can tell. He was handsome. She can see the clean, hard lines of his face, where it’s not streaked in dried blood. His hair is matted with blood, dark, mostly likely frozen; she can just see the edges of an angry, clotted wound on his temple. 

She picks her way down the slope to see him more closely. The blood and water have frozen in his hair; his eyes are closed, and if it were not so cold, if he were not a soldier, if he had not been lying in the freezing Seine for days, she would almost think he was sleeping. There are tattered gold epaulets on his jacket. An officer of some sort. Pockets worth looting. 

She bites at her lip, stooping carefully, taking tiny, careful steps closer. The rocks are so slippery; her shawls threaten to fall when she reaches out. She has to move his arms first, sliding them up away from the rock he was clutching. He’s cold, his arms as solid and stiff as firewood. Then she gets him by the shoulders and heaves; the ice formed around his waist in the water cracks and pops as it breaks and he slides a few centimeters up the bank. She only needs him far enough to get to his pockets without risking falling into the river herself. She pulls at him again. He’s so heavy, was solid and muscular in life, and his woolen clothes are soaked through with water. 

She has to stop and catch her breath, hands on her knees, panting, her breath rising in angry plumes about her. He’s farther out of the river for her efforts than he was; his hips are visible, partially up on the rocky shore. It might be far enough-- but he’s positioned awkwardly, scrunched forward on his belly, lying on his coat and pinning it down. She won’t get at any pockets that way. She sighs and straightens, bracing herself on the least icy patch of rocks she can find, and shoves at the body until it’s turned over mostly on it’s side. Good enough for the first set of pockets.

She sees, as she pats his jacket down, that he’s missing a leg below the knee; a wooden peg is attached to it, broken off in splinters halfway down its length. 

And then she’s screaming because he’s opened his eyes.

They’re blue. Oh Mother of God. He can’t still be alive, how long was he in the water?-- but he’s looking at her, straight at her, befuddled and confused, but absolutely at her while she shrieks, scrambling backwards on the icy rocks. 

He grumbles something-- it’s a foreign language, she doesn’t know it, it might not even be words-- then coughs violently, jerking sideways to vomit up a stream of foul water. His limbs are stiff and his movements more so; his fingers are still clenched, gripping at nothing.

He makes a word, then louder. To her astonishment, she recognizes it as a name. 

“Genevieve?” he asks again, muzzily, and then starts to speak in what is not French, Spanish, must be either German or English by the sound of it. Either way, probably an enemy. 

“Are you Prussian or English?” she demands, shaking because it is so cold, shaking because he is alive. He stares at her, squinting, and says something, forcefully. ‘Geldar’, isn’t that German, isn’t that their word for gold? “Prussian! Or! English!” she repeats, louder and slower. He answers in similarly offended tones. 

There is a sound in the fog, behind her-- she turns to look because it sounds a little like a winded horse, it sounds a little like the blacksmith’s bellows or a church organ. 

“Did you hear that?” the resurrected man asks, suddenly perfectly understandable. 

“You do speak French!” 

“I do not,” he snaps. “Don’t have a word of it. Damn frog lingo. You aren’t Genevieve.” 

“No! Who is Genevieve?” 

He stops, mouth open slackly. “...I don’t remember.” 

“You are English.” 

“Of course I am.” Now he is affronted again. “And freezing, thank you for asking.” 

“A sailor? Yes?” she barks.

“An _officer_ , ma’am. Of--” blankness steels back over his face. “Fortitude? No. No that isn’t right. Sutherland-- no. So cold-- I’m so damned cold. My ship. My ship is-- did you hear that, just now?” 

“A ship? No, there is nothing on the river.” She doesn’t glance away, she could be lying, but there wasn’t one before, and she doesn’t want to take her eyes from this man who is impossibly alive and growing more agitated. “There was only that sound, a moment ago. Wheezing.”

“Yes, that’s it. Groaning. My mother’s cottage, I must get to it.”

“A cottage-?”

“Nonsuch!” He hauls himself up to sitting, pulling uselessly at his ruined clothes. “Right on the tip of my tongue the whole time. Nonsuch. She’s my ship.” 

“She is close by?”

“No. No, back down the Seine, far. I have to get home….” 

“To your cottage.” 

“Yes, to my ship.” 

“You said she was far away, your ship.” 

“No! No, old girl’s right nearby or we couldn’t be talking, could we?” he asks, as if the answer is obvious. “So close. So close to home.” 

Crazy English. She decides that this is his name and his rank. Crazy English. 

She shivers as the winter latches onto her bones; she’s been standing still too long. And she hasn’t been lying frozen in the river. She squints at Crazy English; there’s frost on his jacket, along the seams. He must be ice cold. Maybe his brain froze. Maybe it was the blow to his head that made him so crazy. 

“This jacket is ruined,” Crazy English says, dejectedly. “Here, help me up. Oh. This leg is ruined too, that’s a pity.”

She hesitates. He’s looking at her expectantly, and she sees in his wild face that he will crawl on hands and knees if she refuses to help. 

“Please? I have to find the ship-- oh God, I have to find the Commodore-- he was lost in the water when Arakssor brought the walls down, he’ll drown if we can’t get him out. Brown, quickly! Captain!”

He lurches forward, propelling himself with his hands, back towards the water. She almost lets him go-- it is not her problem if the crazy Englishman is determined to kill himself-- but she can’t, and shouts angrily, trying to keep from pitching forward into the water when she grabs for his arm.

“No, no, stop. That is stupid, you will not survive. English! English, listen to me!”

“We have to save the Captain!” 

“No one is alive in there! It has been days since the blast! You should be dead!” 

“Blast--” his eyes flicker, and he is lost again. 

“The blast. There was a battle in Caudebec. In my home, bastard English. Then an explosion and now I have no home.” 

He murmurs the name of the town and she wants to smack the word out of his pretty mouth. He has no right. “This-- this isn’t the Loire.” 

“It is the Seine.” 

“This isn’t Anarctica.” 

“It is _France_.” 

“The Commodore… is safe.”

She has no answer for that, so it’s fortunate he seems sure about it. 

He sags forward onto hands and knee, and starts sluggishly to crawl away from the river.

“No, English,” she says, stomach turning, the sight of him writhing across the field worse because unlike the corpses in the water he moves. “Here. My shoulder, here.” 

It is a terrible procession they make-- he is solid, and heavy, and has barely the strength to hop along even supported by her shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, as she grunts with one lurching step. 

“Good. Do you know where you are going?” 

“Yes. I can hear her.” 

“Your cottage.” 

He gives a hollow laugh. “My mother’s little cottage in Chichester. Yes. There is no such place, you know.” 

Something in his voice is changing. When he woke up, he sounded like a farmer’s son, a working man. Now he sounds like a lord; polished and fanciful. A drunk lord. Crazy. Crazy English.

“I don’t have four sisters. I don’t have any. Just a ship.” 

“In the forest.” 

“Yes.” He lets out a breath. “I can see her now.” 

“See what--” but there is something inside the trees, something strangely vibrant in the bleak landscape. She braces herself, tries to pull him along a little quicker, curious and wary all at once. 

It is in a clearing, the bright blue thing-- on closing with it, a box. A cabinet? A wardrobe? Nothing more, a box with a door like a guard’s post, some writing that is mostly English as far as she can tell. It is all over blue, a pure, beautiful blue that stood out against gray snow and brown mud and brown trees. Crazy English gives a little moan and reaches for it, suddenly lurching away from her and sagging against it. 

“D-don’t have my key,” he says, after a moment, his voice so exhausted now that they’ve reached their destination “There’s, there’s a spare. Above the ‘P.’” 

She looks, reads ‘police’ which is real word, and ‘box’, which she supposes is English, and-- because she has done so many foolish things already, when Crazy English braces himself on one knee and his hands again and says: “Here, use my back,” she climbs up and feels until she finds the little cupboard above the P, and inside it a key on a fob. 

She presents it to him wordlessly, glaring. He barely notices her, fumbling at the lock on the big guardpost box. 

Light spills out when he opens it, clear and white, and she steps back, reality taking hold of her again, suspicion and alarm warning her away, away from whatever this is and whatever Crazy English is doing. 

“Wait-?” he says. Ah, he’s remembered she exists; she wishes he hadn’t. “Wait. Don’t-- I don’t know your name yet.” 

“I don’t know yours.” 

“I’m--” he gives an ugly chuckle. “I’m the Doctor.” 

“I am Manette.” Crazy. Crazy English. 

“Thank you.” 

“Please. Don’t mention it.” 

He waves to her, and then slumps inside his cabinet, crawling entirely inside, and somehow… further. Than he should. The box is no deeper than she is tall, less so, in fact, and yet-- 

She peers in. 

What she sees is impossible.

Her mind refuses it. She prepared for so much this morning; she did not prepare for this. Not for a cabinet that is far, far bigger inside than out, that is filled with strange, beautiful, frightening lights and noises, with candles and bookshelves-- so many books! She has never seen so many books. There is so much space, it seems like it must stretch the seams of the little blue box. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen so much empty space inside, either, unused except for the padded chairs, the mats on the odd floor, and in the centre a mast, a giant pillar with six strange legs, filled with blinking lights. 

She has never seen anything like this, never believed there could be anything like this-- she wants a closer look at impossible. She takes a step forward, puts her foot down just inside the too-large doorway, and is filled with the sounds and shaking of this impossible box.

No. 

No. She steps back, out into the cold winter and the bleak morning. This is not for her, this is not what she must do. This is not her burnt out home or her sister’s farm or her poor father.

English has forgotten about her. He is lying in the middle of it all at the base of the main mast as if he’s finally realized he should be dead, but before she can summon enough madness to go in and check his pulse, he lurches upright with a shout. 

The light, so bright-- but this light is coming from his skin, racing in golden tracks over it, flickering; he claws at the wooden debris strapped at his leg, undoing it frantically, and as fast as he removes it something new is beginning to form itself, protrude from his ragged trouser leg-- 

And then Manette shuts the door and walks away. There are pockets still to pick and the wreck of her home to turn over, looking for anything that can be saved, and that is her province and and impossible blue wardrobes are the province of mad Englishmen, and they are welcome to it.

* * *

It hurts like regeneration all over, coming back to himself. He knows his hearts are wrong before they right themselves, has a moment of panic at feeling their faint synchronised throb-throb, half the pace it should be before his heartbeats desynchronize and they start to find their rhythms again, blood pressure fluxing and making his ears ring. 

His memories are a mess, always are after he’s been someone else too long, but this is bad, this is-- he puts his foot down on his floor, his left foot, the foot that shouldn’t be there but is, and the fresh new nerves in it tingle and make contact feel like an acid bath. 

“What did you do?” 

Stupid question. Stupid Doctor. What did the old girl do, what do you think she did, giving you one heart beat and quieting your mind down. Human. _Human_. With linear, simple human memories, they feel strange and cumbersome in his mind but all too present and overwhelming at the same time. He feels betrayed, he feels horrifyingly lonely, he feels so happy to be home that he could cry and rage, because this is home; there was never a cottage in Chichester, just this place where he slept and waited to go back to sea again, and dreamed of sisters and a sturdy practical human mother. 

"What was the point?" he bellows, fist coming down on the console. His leg throbs; every twitch bringing back clearer and clearer memories of missing it-- as complex neurons throb and spark and join, as he lifts out of the soft blurry linear thought of humanity. It is like regeneration only it isn’t, but it seems it's _enough_ like regeneration for his leg to have regrown-- 

His leg--

Oh dear, it's all perfectly clear, the memories are coming back into perfect focus. He can smell it, oh no, the stink of bilge and blood and frightened men, hear the screams-- so many people dying, he's seen so many people die-- the pain and the sensation that he still has a foot though every time he looks down there's still just shattered bone. The cold Spanish prison where it was amputated up to the knee-- _can you tell the doctor that the foot I haven't got is itching--_

"Was that what you thought I needed?" he rages, slamming his fist onto the panelling again, and it hurts but everything seems to be hurting. His hearts being out of synch feels unnatural, they've been beating quietly as one for too, too long. "Was that how-- you heard me. Oh, no, you heard me. 'Make me a warrior.' I wasn’t talking to you, you know! I didn’t know you were there-- I should have. Stupid, stupid doctor. 

“Decided to save me from the Sisters, did you? Was I not dead, after all? Decided you could do it better, even if I was? Give me enough time, a deep enough trance, long enough near your heart-- but I didn’t want it to be like this, I didn’t want _me_ to be like this! It should have been someone else! Not me, not-- stupid! Not full of follow-my-leader yes-sir monarchical nonsense! D'you know how many people I've killed? Do you know how many people died? Because I was _following orders_ , because I believed in the regime? Surely that wasn’t what you wanted from me! Aren’t there enough CIA agents, God damn ‘em--" he hears his old human voice with its prudish blasphemy sneak out and if takes the wind out of him. 

He sags, staring at his hands. They're gnarled-- constant hard work and limited cellular repair, he's even aged like a human, grown calloused like one. There's blood on these hands, not visible now, but they've held pistols, they've held a cutlass, he's felt the rage of war and he's killed and killed.

And never a qualm, no, that stupid, stolid awful creature. Damn the frogs and run out the guns, for king and country. He rejects it. "He was no part of me," he howls, with fresh, raw anger welling up. "Officious and prejudiced and savage and obedient and authoritarian--" 

Oh, yes, there are memories too, Evelyn snapping at him that _you can't control everything_ and his own voice, desperate and a life younger growling back _I can damn well try_ and other lives and officiousness and prejudice and threatening to take Morgaine’s head off and meaning it for a moment and his own dark side with its bloodthirst _(don’t you moralize at me, I’m part of you, don’t forget that)_. 

"--all right! All right! Maybe some of those things but never _obedient_ \--" 

But he had been, where had the TARDIS ever gotten that? Not just obedient, but at his best listening to someone. Assisting, not planning, knowing when to follow orders and when not to and rolling his eyes gently at the condescension of-- of. No, not thinking of it. 

"All right, maybe turnabout is fair play! That's it. You were just giving me a bit of my own medicine, fine. You’ve brought this up before, but this was very good, very, very, very pointed. Yes, I get it, letting me be the one playing second fiddle, but you could have made me _clever_ , I've known plenty of clever humans--" and no that was wrong, he wasn't stupid, not really. He was just set against someone with a cutting, dangerous, frightening brilliance who didn't know what to make of it, he was only dull in comparison to that, and dull the way a scabbard is dull because it's supposed to guard you against the sharp. Even from the wielder, his poor-- his dear--

"So-! So, all right, yes, you've taught me a good lesson about being-- being you and being one of my companions, yes, all right, now I know how it feels to be slower and always looking up and respecting despite it all and loving--" No! “And it was cute, it was very, it was charming-- to make me incapable of _lying_ and actually suspicious of a little judicious manipulation, I get it! Very funny. Maybe that’s why I gravitated toward him, maybe I never really cared, maybe I just sensed that he had something I’d lost. Maybe I never loved him, eh? Maybe--” 

His voice breaks; he slides down to the floor, dragging his fingers over his face and gripping his hair because he can’t make that sound at all convincing. He did love. He still does. 

"You dropped me directly in my own time tracks, you must realize. Trafalgar? The Baltic? I could have tripped over my own scarf in Russia, you know! Sloppy, that's what I call it!"

He's only grasping at straws now, trying to stay angry so that he doesn't sink into the misery he can feel coming up about him. Yes, he has learned a lesson. He's learned how to be a warrior, the terrible terrible price of it, learned how to be heartless in the face of the enemy, and he's learned more, learned how to deal with a genius in a sulk, to look at the dreadful misery from outside and withstand it. He's learned why....

Why they were so happy. Why so many of them stayed when things had gone so wrong. Why Ace threw it all away to come back and Charley was willing to come after him into another universe when he'd been capricious and nasty, and stayed with him until she finally couldn’t, why so many of them had insisted on staying, had wanted to stay, to travel with him again even after the terrible things they’d seen, why so many had forgiven him, why Lucie had needed to trust him and had forgiven him and wanted to come back, why Tegan found it so hard to walk away even at the very end-- he's _learned_ and it's crushing him from the inside out because he wants nothing more than to _go back_ himself and have more adventures and he can't, he can't, _he can't_.

"You took so much away," he whispers to the gently humming TARDIS. "But you left my respiratory bypass, had an emergency homing beacon set if I got too close to death. You wanted me to survive if I could-- this me. Not a new me. You weren’t ready for this me to go. But I can't go back to him now and that's what this me wants! 

“Haha, oh, but what would I say? 'Hello, not actually human, not actually the military type. But that's all right, it turns out I am actually _very good_ at whist and my French is impeccable. Don't worry, the war will be over in a few weeks-- oh, yes, Boney will pop right back off Elba but give it a hundred days or so. How _is_ your lady wife I have the most entertaining story about her brother oh wait that won't happen for another thirty years, how gauche of me!' I can't go back. I can't go back and I love him and I can't even tell him I'm alive. You should have let me drown, freeze to death, die like a human too and come back the Time Lord I needed to be." 

He’s raving, sounds unhinged, and makes himself shut his mouth. He thinks there's a reproachful tone in the engine noise once he can hear anything but his own pounding hearts-- the old girl wouldn’t let him die that way. And despite it all he doesn’t want to, he isn’t ready to anymore. If he had the grail again he would pour it out on the ground and fight to live on his own terms. Twenty years of war is nothing to him, he can stand these memories. But it was half of a lifetime to him, too, and in the fires of a brief human life it’s reforged his will to exist into something stronger than Dalekanium. He’ll appreciate that later, maybe, but right now he is in no mood for small blessings or even large ones.

It’s like a poison in him, that will kill or immunize him. He understands war in a way he hadn’t before, understands all the parts of it he was ignorant of, standing above it and saying _this is not me, I am better than this_. Always outside, always the stranger sweeping in to help, until war came to time itself. 

He's gained the knowledge and the will; despite all his raving, that was the point. His human self had the ability to fight and kill without losing himself, to give all of himself when necessary but never unnecessarily. That self had another thing, too, but he’s lost that in this little rebirth--he'll never get back his faith. His blind, naive faith, like a blanket around him in the cold, a comfortable certainty when everything was uncertain. He felt something like it for Ace but he’d still manipulated her, still kept his secrets, had been too afraid for her to trust her entirely with all the truth. 

He can’t afford that kind of trust again, and he misses it, that belief that there is one lodestone, one person to set things right, one frail, fallible tone-deaf anxious darling human whom he can never, never see again. He tugs himself into a ball, arms around his legs-- the one bare, fresh pink leg with no scars, the other scarred and half-frozen under its muddy trousers, and he shakes and sobs and swears all the silly blasphemous oaths he learned in twenty years at sea and centuries in the cosmos. And then, after a while, he clambers to shaky feet and stands. 

Time needs a warrior. It has him. Damn both your houses. Run out the battle TARDISes. For time and all existence. His hearts pound, and the sound is the sound of a broadside.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic made possible by the kind plausibility and Time War chronology checking of [Blackletter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blackletter)!


End file.
